Less than a year ago, a group of convention center supporters sent the White House a petition opposing Sharp’s candidacy, calling his group “dishonest and manipulative.” Not everyone in the Music City Center Coalition agreed; chairman Ron Samuels wrote a letter in support of Sharp and called him “a very, very fine person.”

Perhaps the letter was more persuasive than the petition.

Here’s a profile of Sharp that I wrote at the end of 2009. It appeared in the Jan. 3 newspaper.

Nashville convention center attacks get personal

By Michael Cass

THE TENNESSEAN

When he was 18, Kevin Sharp worked for a Memphis gas station at the dawn of the pump-your-own era. It was in the days before customers could pay at the pump with the swipe of a credit card.

Sharp played the role of enforcer.

“Nobody really realizes what happens if people just drive off with gas,” he recalled. “So I get hired to walk around with a baseball bat. I was 6’2″, 230 (pounds), and I just kind of walked around with this baseball bat as people were pumping their gas: ‘Yeah, you’re going to pay for that, right?’

“I never had to use it. Nobody ever drove off while I was there.”

Nearly 30 years later, Sharp is in a different kind of confrontation – one in which he says he’s trying to keep Metro government honest before it votes on a new convention center that would be the most expensive public project in city history.

Since September, the attorney and Navy veteran has been leading Nashville’s Priorities, a group opposed to Mayor Karl Dean’s $585 million proposal. The group has raised the intensity of the debate, but its arguments, tactics and fundraising practices have upset many in the city’s power structure.

The simmering resentment recently boiled over in the form of a petition started by convention center lobbyist Dave Cooley to oppose Sharp’s bid for a federal judgeship.

Cooley, a former deputy governor who is no stranger to playing political hardball, said he collected 102 signatures, including those of at least a few other convention center supporters, and mailed the petition to the White House three days before Christmas.

Nashville’s Priorities attacked

Nashville’s Priorities “bills itself as a citizen organization formed to oppose the construction of a new convention center for Nashville,” the petition read. “In truth, it is a front organization for a national company that opposes the convention center project out of self-interest.

“Nashville’s Priorities has engaged in one of the most dishonest and manipulative campaigns in recent Nashville history.”

Randy Rayburn, a restaurant owner and convention center backer who signed Cooley’s petition, said Sharp shouldn’t be expressing his opinion on a public issue while seeking a judgeship.

“The role of the judiciary is to be impartial in the halls of justice, and I think it shows poor judgment and potential judicial temperament,” Rayburn said.

Sharp, a longtime behind-the-scenes activist in Democratic campaigns, said he’s accustomed to bruising political fights but has been surprised by how quickly things turned personal in the convention center debate.

“Normally you ignore your opposition,” said Sharp, 46. “Then if they start gaining traction you attack their ideas. Then if that doesn’t work you attack the personality.

“They skipped steps one and two.”

But not everyone who supports the convention center has gone after Sharp.

Ron Samuels, chairman of the Music City Center Coalition, wrote a letter supporting his friend’s judicial candidacy earlier this year.

“He’s a very, very fine person,” Samuels said last week.

Donation raises eyebrows

A few days after Nashville’s Priorities announced its plans to raise questions about the convention center plan, Gaylord Entertainment Co. lobbyist Tom Ingram confirmed that Gaylord had given the group $8,500.

The donation raised questions about the new group’s motives. Did it really want to start a dialogue about a plan that was just a few months from a final vote? Or was it doing the bidding of the company that owns Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Donelson?

Sharp’s own participation in the group also was scrutinized. Despite an active role in politics, he hadn’t done much on issues specific to Nashville. And his father-in-law, Lew Conner, is an attorney who has worked for Gaylord and is close to its chairman and CEO, Colin Reed, as well as Ingram.

Some convention center supporters contend that Conner, an active Republican, has been working to persuade U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker to support Sharp’s judicial candidacy in exchange for Sharp’s leadership of Nashville’s Priorities.

Another theory has it that Conner, who met Sharp at the Stokes Bartholomew law firm in the ’90s, advised him to raise his profile by becoming the group’s front man.

Conner said nothing could be further from the truth.

“It’s hurt him to be doing this,” he said. “That is ludicrous. When you’re trying to get a federal judgeship, that’s the last thing you want to do.”

Conner acknowledged recommending Sharp to the Republican senators but said plenty of people are doing that for him and other candidates.

Sharp, who did some legal work for Gaylord in 2001 – he was at their offices during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks – said the company didn’t start Nashville’s Priorities, and neither Conner nor anyone from Gaylord pushed him into it.

He said he thought his bid for a judgeship was over when the group formed, but he’s heard since then that’s he’s “back on the radar screen.”

‘Hitting below the belt’

U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, who recommended Sharp and other candidates to President Barack Obama’s administration, said he doesn’t know where the process stands.

“The Democratic congressional delegation submitted several names to the White House last winter for the Nashville District Court judgeship,” Cooper said in a written statement.

“Kevin Sharp’s name was on the list. We have heard very little from the White House since then, so we are unclear about the Administration’s intentions.”

Meanwhile, Cooley’s petition has riled Sharp’s friends and family.

“That’s retaliatory,” said Jay Drescher, his law partner. “That’s taking the gloves off and hitting below the belt.”

Councilwoman Emily Evans, who has been accused of opposing the convention center to advance her political ambitions, said some of the boosters won’t let critics be against the project for pure policy reasons.

“It’s unfortunate, because there’s plenty to talk about within the confines of the debate,” she said.

But Sharp still refuses to identify most of Nashville’s Priorities’ donors. He said Gaylord hasn’t given anything since the $8,500 donation in September, while one individual has given more than that. He said the group has raised $50,000 to $60,000 from more than 30 donors.

Sharp said many of the donors don’t want to be identified for fear of “retaliation or retribution or just hurt feelings out of the mayor’s office.” He said Nashville’s Priorities’ tax status as a nonprofit, noncharitable organization allows it to withhold donors’ names.

Last year’s unsuccessful campaign to force Metro to do all business in English was hampered by questions about its funding, most of which came from an out-of-state group.

Price tag jumps out at Sharp

Sharp said he didn’t pay close attention to the convention center project at first. He thought it was a done deal based on the city’s decisions to hire architects and buy land in 2008 and early 2009.

The Metro Council is scheduled to take a final vote Jan. 19 on Dean’s proposal to build the convention center.

Sharp said a group of concerned citizens, led by strategic planner Allen Hovious, approached him through a mutual acquaintance last summer and pointed out how the project had changed over the past few years.

Sharp then began to look at the project more closely, concluding that “this thing smells.”

“To have this kind of public decision without a public dialogue … you’re not going to arrive at the right answer,” he said in an interview in his office at Drescher & Sharp, which is full of American history books and memorabilia from World War II.

Hovious said Sharp, who managed a challenging but successful statewide re-election campaign by former Tennessee Supreme Court Justice A.A. Birch in 1998, has brought political savvy, communication skills and a lawyer’s desire to “get the facts.”

“I thought if we just showed people that this is a difficult decision, they would understand that,” Hovious said. “But Kevin said, ‘No, this is a political activity, and it’s going to be a political challenge.’ ”

But people on the other side of the issue say Sharp and his group have stretched the truth and misled the public.

The Music City Center Coalition has accused Nashville’s Priorities of running a push poll. It also has criticized Sharp’s effort to persuade the Metro Council to hold a countywide referendum, which would cost more than $250,000 but wouldn’t have any binding effect.

Samuels said he’s been particularly frustrated by the argument that Nashville could spend $1 billion – the potential cost of a convention hall and hotel – on other tourist attractions. State law doesn’t allow the visitor taxes and fees dedicated to the project to be used for anything else, though Nashville’s Priorities says that could be changed.

“I’m not sure why they were established around the convention center, because their foundation seems to be a misconception that we have $1 billion to spend,” Samuels said.

Wife: He has a thick skin

Sharp met his wife, Holly, in 1999 at a Tennessee Titans game at what’s now LP Field, the last major public project to create this level of public debate in Nashville.

Using a sports metaphor, Holly Sharp said her husband – who has a 15-year-old daughter from a previous marriage – has always been active in the public sphere.

“He doesn’t sit on the sideline and whine about how things should be,” she said. “He’s always asking, ‘What can we do to effect change instead of sitting around and finger-pointing?’ ”

His fortitude hasn’t changed much since his Memphis gas station days, she said. He has a thick skin for battles like the one he’ll be waging for at least two more weeks.